The best show on TV right now is AMC’s “Interview with the Vampire” and chances are you’re not watching.

That’s because without a big advertising spend, too many titles fall through the cracks in today’s TV landscape. Especially if the show relies on cable viewers. The show is also available on AMC’s streaming platform, which has just 11.5 million subscribers, barely a drop compared to Netflix’s 83 million in North America alone.

There are discounts available for new AMC+ subscribers if you do some sleuthing online (none of which are being marketed), including a 30-day free trial. I’m not here to shill for AMC, but it looks like you can get a plan for as low as $4.99 a month. That’s cheaper than pretty much any other streaming platform and it’s money well spent for this show alone. Still unconvinced? The pilot episode from Season 1 is free on YouTube.

“Interview with the Vampire” would likely reach a wider audience on another streamer, but it has a lot in common with other titles that established the AMC brand. The writing has the wit, confidence and swagger of “Mad Men.” The story arcs have the brutal outlook of “Breaking Bad” and the monster premise of “The Walking Dead.” But it is resolutely its own titillating story — about unreliable narrators, fallible memories and emotions splattered all over the place like a Jackson Pollock painting.

The series is adapted from Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles novels, which begin with a tantalizing premise: One guy interviewing another guy, who claims to be a vampire.

It’s the story of an over- the-top relationship between Lestat de Lioncourt, a French-born vampire with a floridly camp personality, and Louis de Pointe du Lac, the American who Lestat turns into his vampire companion. They have an intense and combustible push-pull energy that ends up ensnaring — destroying? — everyone in their orbit. It’s a story that toggles between the past and the present, the latter featuring Daniel Molloy, who plays the doubting journalist. In the show, he has traveled to a penthouse in Dubai to conduct the interview with Louis. What he will eventually realize is that combing through the past will blow up everyone’s lives, including his own.

Created by showrunner Rolin Jones, the series differs slightly from the books, but maintains the sensibility of the world Rice conjured. Louis is no longer a white Louisiana plantation owner discovered by Lestat in the 1790s, but a Black New Orleans bordello owner in the 1910s. This allows the show to contemplate all the ways race and racism plays out in New Orleans, but also adds a layer of frisson to the Louis-Lestat power plays. The other major change is that all the coy homoerotic subtext of their relationship is now overtly text. They are lovers locked in one of the most toxic relationships put to screen.

So who is watching? The Season 2 premiere on AMC drew 282,000 viewers in mid- May, and the numbers have dropped each week, down to 185,000 for the episode that aired June 2. Apparently, the cable experience is subpar; on social media people have complained about abrupt cuts to commercial.

It’s telling that AMC hasn’t sent any email blasts to boast about streaming numbers either, and unfortunately, Nielsen, the third party company that tracks viewer data, doesn’t cover AMC+.

But we’re not completely in the dark. Parrot Analytics compiles something called an audience demand metric, which is based on Google searches, how often people visit a show’s Wikipedia and IMDb pages, audience views of the trailer and other relevant videos on YouTube, pirating as well as social media buzz. The company “tracks every single one of those interactions because we feel it better reflects how the modern consumer is engaging with and interacting with content,” said industry strategist Brandon Katz. How is “Interview with the Vampire” doing according to these metrics? Between May 12 and May 26, it was about 20 times more in-demand in the U.S. than the average show.

Let’s put AMC’s limited streaming audience aside for a moment. I asked Kristen Warner, a professor at Cornell University’s Department of Performing and Media Arts, why she thinks the show has yet to break through to a bigger audience.

“I think some of it has to do with the fact that when you’re writing male melodrama this way — and it’s not a mobster show like ‘The Sopranos’ — you make a lot of folks uncomfortable. It is unabashedly and unapologetically and unashamedly about feelings,” she said.

But that’s true of shows like “Mad Men” and “Succession.” A lot of those feelings center on inadequacy, which the characters believe can be mitigated by success in capitalism.

Be it advertising or media domination — in “The Bear,” it’s a restaurant, in “Breaking Bad,” it’s the illegal manufacture of meth — business is the external entity through which all these feelings can be filtered. Maybe the difference is that “Interview with the Vampire” strips all that out. There is no buffer; it’s all feelings.

Warner had another observation. “In so many vampire stories, when men bite men, it’s violent. When men bite women, it’s erotic and that’s not by accident. ‘Interview with the Vampire’ is going in a different direction by allowing the thing that’s below the surface to rise and be visible. It’s not afraid to do that. There is no metaphor. It is exactly what you see. They are very clear about what biting each other and sleeping in the same coffin means.”

I was skeptical about the show when it premiered in 2022. Vampire stories don’t interest me. And the 1994 movie adaptation starring Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt wasn’t a persuasive argument to the contrary. But great television is great television, and nothing is better at the moment.

It’s tonally self- assured and unexpectedly funny. There are some moments of violence and gore, but the show picks its spots, and it’s not scary; I wouldn’t categorize the series as horror. It’s richly made TV — rarely focused on the hunt for dinner but on something far more interesting: the melodrama of vampiric existence, with its combination of boredom and lust and tragedy and zingers.

By all rights, the show should dominate the Emmys the way “Succession” and “The Bear” have — but it won’t be eligible this year. Emmy rules require that six episodes premiere by the end of May to qualify. As of June 2, the season had only reached Episode 4. An Emmy campaign (and potential wins) could have gone a long way toward increasing awareness.

There is an entire Anne Rice television universe in the works at AMC. “The Mayfair Witches,” which premiered last year, is objectively terrible. The network recently announced that it has ordered its third Rice series, “The Talamasca,” about a secret society that keeps track of vampires, witches and the like. This is what TV studios do: Churn out new shows based on IP.

AMC executives clearly have a long-term plan. What they haven’t figured out is how to exploit the best show in their arsenal.